Back when I was in high school I really wanted a tripod
but I didn't want to spend the money on one so,
I made one out of wood in my dad's shop.
And, this is the first tripod that I built.
And, unlike a lot of cheap tripods,
this one goes fairly high.
The legs of this tripod extend with a 30 degree
sliding dovetail, and the way it locks is
I just have this screw and wing nut in a cross,
and that just pinches the outside part
on to the leg part, that's the inside part.
Then a shoulder joint allows the legs to pivot individually,
just by having it hinge on
2 counter-sync screws from either side,
And by tightening those, I can get rid of any slack in here.
And for the shaft, originally
I had a cam-lock on here, but that proved to be
too troublesome, in terms of keeping it just right.
So, I replaced that with just a screw-knob that tightens.
And to keep that knob from
damaging the shaft of the tripod,
there's a little piece of metal in here
so that the screw doesn't dig into it, it pushes on the flat.
Then a tripod head uses this bent nail
to allow doing the pan and tilt.
This is a really big nail.
And this screw here
locks in any sort of pan and
this screw here locks in the tilt, and
this part here also allows the camera to go into portrait mode.
And the screw for the camera is actually off to the
side a little bit, because
on both of my SLR cameras, the screw for the tripod,
is not in the middle, so that works out nicely.
Now this tripod head is not the sturdiest,
but I have used it with my big Polaroid Land camera,
model 95A,
and it's held up quite well, surprisingly.
Back in 1982, I could still get film for this beast,
but I only have about 2 packs 'cause it was quite expensive,
and after that I only ever used it for experimenting with
photographing on blueprint paper.
I built this one in 1987, and then as I was about to
head off to University in 1988, I built this one,
and the legs on this one are 3 segments which makes the tripod
a fair bit smaller.
When extending the legs for this, I didn't want 1 part
of the dovetail to come apart before the other one
slid fully extended, so there's a positive stop in here
that keeps both segments from sliding all the way apart.
The way that positive stops work is really clever, in fact
it's almost a bit too clever.
And, just to get it apart, I have to slide a ruler
into the sliding dovetail, to get the thing to disengage.
The way the positive stop works is, there's a cavity here,
and there's a space for a short spring to go in here,
and then there's a little block that fits in front of it,
and that spring always pushes the block out,
when there's room in front of it.
And in here, there's a little notch here so,
once I slide this in,
the block catches the notch and you can hear it click.
[click] And now when I pull it,
it just always catches that notch.
I made a couple of minor changes to the shoulder joint.
Instead of using screws, I used
a steel pin that goes through here,
because what would happen is with humidity changes,
this leg would get wider and narrower,
and so the shoulder joint often got a little bit loose.
But, with a pin, it's tight
even if this gets wider and narrower.
And one other change I made is
just to keep the shoulder a bit narrower,
I made this part in here out of a piece of plumbing pipe,
and that way it's a bit thinner.
And I also have chunk of metal here,
which has the thread cut into it,
for the screw that locks the shaft in place.
And the head of this tripod is exactly the same design
as on my other tripod, only I made it a little bit smaller,
just to keep it more compact.
The sliding dovetail joints for the legs are
30 degree dovetails, and dovetail bits
for joinery tend to be more around 14 or 15 degrees
So, I actually cut these, not with a dovetail bit,
but with a tilting shaper head that had
a 30 degree cutter, but you can also make these
on a table saw and I think I'll make a short video
just showing how to do that.